cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/45730883
With more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras across the U.S., Flock Safety has become one of cops’ go-to surveillance tools and a $7.5 billion business. Now CEO Garrett Langley has both police tech giant Axon and Chinese drone maker DJI in his sights on the way to his noble (if Sisyphean) goal: Preventing all crime in the U.S.
In a windowless room inside Atlanta’s Dunwoody police department, Lieutenant Tim Fecht hits a button and an insectile DJI drone rises silently from the station rooftop. It already has its coordinates: a local mall where a 911 call has alerted the cops to a male shoplifter. From high above the complex, Fecht zooms in on a man checking his phone, then examines a group of people waiting for a train. They’re all hundreds of yards away, but crystal clear on the room-dominating display inside the department’s crime center, a classroom-sized space with walls covered in monitors flashing real- time crime data—surveillance and license plate reader camera feeds, gunshot detection reports, digital maps showing the location of cop cars across the city. As more 911 calls come in, AI transcribes them on another screen. Fecht can access any of it with a few clicks.
Twenty minutes down the road from Dunwoody, in an office where Flock Safety’s cameras and gunshot detectors are arrayed like museum pieces, 38-year-old CEO and cofounder Garrett Langley presides over the $300 million (estimated 2024 sales) company responsible for it all. Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares and parking lots across the U.S. They record not just the license plate numbers of the cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features—broken windows, dings, bumper stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve 1 million crimes a year. Soon they’ll help solve even more. In August, Flock’s cameras will take to the skies mounted on its own “made in America” drones. Produced at a factory the company opened earlier this year near its Atlanta offices, they’ll add a new dimension to Flock’s business and aim to challenge Chinese drone giant DJI’s dominance.
Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. (He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.) It sounds like a pipe dream from another AI-can-solve- everything tech bro, but Langley, in the face of a wave of opposition from privacy advocates and Flock’s archrival, the $2.1 billion (2024 revenue) police tech giant Axon Enterprise, is a true believer. He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.
many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)
A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze's "Postscript on Societies of Control", which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.
The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn't always the most accessible
Oh, have you read the revelation of John the Theologian? It's becoming a reality.
I'm reading Ellul right now and loving it. His predictions were pretty freaky accurate. Especially since he wasn't really a traditional philosopher. I think he had a background in sociology, but he was a law professor, and his writing almost seems to be him writing out well educated vibes.
He also joined the French resistance against Nazis during world war ii and was firmly opposed to the idea of separating Christianity from the socialist aspects of Jesus. Just all around bad ass. I couldn't imagine a better foil for the jackass Nazis trying to run shit now.
I kinda feel like most people should be reading the the Technological Society right now bc of how accurate his predictions were.
The focus on efficiency as a means to an end that just keeps on digging new holes to fill old ones.
Becoming so focused on achieving efficiency and then losing a piece of our humanity in the process.
He has a belief about prison camps being inevitable in a society where efficiency is the ultimate goal. But most importantly he makes it a point to emphasize that this isn't inevitable if enough people are warned in advance and revolt against it.
his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men's Attitudes, is also well worth a read.
I think his ideas on concentration camps/prison camps slot in nicely with Deleuze's ideas about Control Societies and the ways that technology is being used to extend the Foucaultian ideas of discrete enclosures to never-ending enclosures in all aspects of life.
And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich's work. He's another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he's another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.